Tech Life

Well, in November my furnace tried to kill me – and it got pretty close to accomplishing that task. The heat shield had been dislodged, the gas flow was too high, and there was a missing portion of the overall shell. That, alongside the fact that it got substantially colder which caused the furnace to…

Some Background Open Source Large Language Models have lunged forward in 2023, achieving results that rival those of OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Models for programming, for fiction writing, for conversation on seemingly all topics under the sun, and for so much more. HuggingFace introduced the Transformers API Library which as of this writing has…

I’ve had an idea kicking around in my head for a while that I wanted to get working, and lately I’ve been trying to find excuses to write simple programs in Python. The idea was a program that would take in e-book files, and allow you to play them back one work at a time…

VR is about to get a whole lot less V and a whole lot more R for this Yak. From a jerry-rigged phone with untracked hands made of other phones (thanks VRidge Riftcat), to 3 point tracking with the Quest 2, to simulated 5 point tracking with Driver4VR – my el-cheapo journey into Virtual Reality…

I’m going back to the desert in a few weeks, and what would a trip to Burning Man be without some new tech to test out? This year, it’s going to be friend-finder, a means of locating and communicating with someone in a city that is notoriously separated from simple things like casually texting or…

Problem: I want to justify more time in VRSolution: Plan more interesting VR Trips and Stream It What Are The Goals Of This Test? What Hardware and Software Will Be Involved? What’s not to love OBS? Open Broadcast Studio is basically a portable television broadcast booth you can use to patch all sorts of content…

For photos and videos I intend to share with friends, family, or freelancers, I run my own hosting and chose Nextcloud to serve as the platform that does the heavy lifting. I’m running it on Ubuntu 20 LTS, and I use the External Storage App from the App Library in order to reference content that…

Note: This post is specific to NFTs on the Solana Network If you’ve got a Solana address, and you’re active in the NFT space, then you’ve probably seen something like this show up out of nowhere: What’s that? Where did it come from? Did I win something? NO. STOP. This is a scam! Someone is…

The International Space Station (ISS) is up there right now, blasting along at over 17,000 miles an hour, endlessly falling towards a point beyond the horizon. Well, not entirely endlessly – it will come down some day unfortunately. In the meantime, it’s fun to keep tabs on the ISS. To that end, I slapped together…

Right now, a five year long effort begun by Colin Pape is transitioning from a carefully monitored, incrementally tweaked Testnet to its next phase. Presearch is being heralded as the world’s first decentralized contender in the Search Engine space. With almost 4 million registered users and over 150 million searches running through the system monthly,…